Astronomers find the Wolfe Disk, a galaxy that shouldn’t exist in the distant universe

This is the impression of an artist from the Wolfe Disk, a huge rotating disk galaxy in the early universe.

A bright yellow “twist” near the center of this image shows where a planet could form around the Aurigae AB ​​star. The image was captured by the Southern European Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

This artist’s illustration shows the orbits of two stars and an invisible black hole 1,000 light years from Earth. This system includes a star (small orbit seen in blue) in orbit around a newly discovered black hole (orbit in red), as well as a third star in a larger orbit (also in blue).

This illustration shows the core of a star, known as a white dwarf, placed in orbit around a black hole. During each orbit, the black hole snatches more material from the star and pulls it into a bright disc of material around the black hole. Prior to his encounter with the black hole, the star was a red giant in the later stages of stellar evolution.

This artist’s illustration shows the collision of two 125-mile-wide dusty and dusty bodies that orbit the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light years away. It was once thought that observation of the consequences of this collision was an exoplanet.

This is the impression of an artist from the interstellar comet 2I / Borisov as he travels through our solar system. New observations have detected carbon monixide in the comet tail as the sun warms the comet.

This rosette model is the orbit of a star, called S2, around the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

This is an illustration of the artist from SN2016aps, which astronomers believe is the brightest supernova ever observed.

This is an illustration of the artist of a brown dwarf, or of a “failed star” object, and its magnetic field. The atmosphere and magnetic field of the brown dwarf rotate at different speeds, which allowed astronomers to determine the wind speed on the object.

This artist’s illustration shows an intermediate-mass black hole that tears in a star.

This is the artist’s impression of a large star known as HD74423 and his much smaller red dwarf companion in a binary star system. The big star seems to pulsate only on one side, and is distorted by the gravitational pull of its companion star in a teardrop shape.

This is the impression of an artist of two white dwarfs about to merge. While astronomers expected this to cause a supernova, they found an instance of two dwarf white stars that survived the merger.

A combination of space and terrestrial telescopes found evidence of the largest explosion observed in the universe. The explosion was created by a black hole located in the central galaxy of the Ophiuchus group, which detonated jets and dug a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas.

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, has undergone an unprecedented darkening. This image was taken in January using the Southern European Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

This new ALMA image shows the result of a stellar fight: a complex and surprising gas environment surrounding the binary star system HD101584.

A white dwarf, on the left, is extracting material from a brown dwarf, on the right, about 3000 light years from Earth.

This image shows the orbits of the six G objects in the center of our galaxy, with the supermassive black hole indicated with a white cross. Stars, gas and dust are in the background.

After the stars die, they expel their particles into space, which in turn form new stars. In one case, the stardust stuck in a meteor that fell to Earth. This illustration shows that stardust could flow from sources such as the Egg Nebula to create the grains recovered from the meteorite, which landed in Australia.

The former polar star, Alpha Draconis or Thuban, is circled here in an image of the northern sky.

Galaxy UGC 2885, nicknamed the “Godzilla galaxy”, may be the largest in the local universe.

The host galaxy of a recently traced repetitive radio burst acquired with the Gemini-Nord telescope of 8 meters.

The central region of the Milky Way was photographed using the Southern European Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

This is an illustration of the artist of what MAMBO-9 would look like in visible light. The galaxy is very dusty and has not yet built most of its stars. The two components show that the galaxy is melting.

Astronomers found a white dwarf star surrounded by a gas disk created by a giant ice planet that was torn apart by its gravity.

New measurements of the black hole in the center of the Holm 15A galaxy reveal that it is 40 billion times more massive than our sun, making it the heaviest known black hole to measure directly.

A close-up view of an interstellar comet passing through our solar system can be seen on the left. On the right, astronomers used an image of the Earth for comparison.

The galaxy NGC 6240 is home to three supermassive black holes in its core.

The gamma-ray bursts are shown in this artist’s illustration. They can be triggered by collision or neutron stars or by the explosion of a super massive star, which collapses into a black hole.

Two peacock-like gas clouds have been found in the nearby dwarf galaxy the Great Magellanic Cloud. In these images of ALMA telescopes, red and green highlight the molecular gas while blue shows ionized hydrogen gas.

The impression of an artist from the large black hole of the Milky Way that launches a star from the center of the galaxy.

The Jack-o’-lantern Nebula is located on the edge of the Milky Way. The radiation from the massive star at its center created empty spaces in the ghostly-looking nebula that make it look like a carved pumpkin.

This new NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures two equally sized galaxies in a collision that appears to resemble a ghostly face. This observation was made on June 19, 2019 in the light visible from the telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.

A new SPHERE / VLT image of Hygiea, which could be the smallest dwarf planet in the solar system. As an object in the main asteroid belt, Hygiea immediately meets three of the four requirements to be classified as a dwarf planet: orbit around the Sun, it is not a moon and, unlike a planet, has not cleaned up the neighborhood around its orbit. The final requirement is that it has sufficient mass that its own gravity pulls it into an approximately spherical shape. This is what VLT observations have now revealed about Hygiea.

This is an artist’s representation of what a massive galaxy from the early universe might look like. The rendering shows that star formation in the galaxy is illuminating the surrounding gas. Image by James Josephides / Swinburne Astronomy Productions, Christina Williams / University of Arizona and Ivo Labbe / Swinburne.

This is an illustration by the artist of the disc of gas and dust around the star HD 163296. The gaps in the disc are probably the location of the newborn planets that are forming.

This is a two-color composite image of the comet 2I / Borisov captured by the Gemini Nord telescope on September 10.

This illustration shows a young planet forming in a child-proof star system.

Using a simulation, astronomers shed light on the weak gaseous filaments that make up the cosmic network in a huge cluster of galaxies.

The Wide Field Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope observed Saturn in June as the planet approached Earth this year, approximately 1.36 billion kilometers away.

The impression of an artist of the massive explosions of ionizing radiation that explode from the center of the Milky Way and hit the Magellan stream.

The Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter array captured this unprecedented image of two circumstellar discs, in which the child’s stars grow, feeding material from the surrounding birth disc.

This is an illustration of the artist of what a Neptune-sized moon would look like in orbit around the gas giant exoplanet Kepler-1625b in a star system 8,000 light years from Earth. It may be the first exomoon ever discovered.

This infrared image of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows a cloud of gas and dust full of bubbles, which are inflated by the wind and radiation of huge young stars. Each bubble is filled with hundreds or thousands of stars, which are formed by thick clouds of gas and dust.

This is an artist’s impression of the fast radio path that exploded FRB 181112 traveling from a distant host galaxy to reach Earth. Along the way he passed through the halo of a galaxy.

After passing too close to a supermassive black hole, the star in this artist’s conception is torn into a thin stream of gas, which is then pulled back around the black hole and crashes into itself, creating a bright shock and expelling more hot material.

Comparison of GJ 3512 with the Solar System and other nearby red dwarf planetary systems. The planets around a solar mass star can grow until they start accumulating gas and become giant planets like Jupiter in a few million years. But we thought that small stars like Proxima, TRAPPIST-1, the star of Teegardern and GJ 3512, could not form mass planets of Jupiter.

A collision of three galaxies has put three supermassive black holes on a crash course between them in a system a billion light years from Earth.

2I / Borisov is the first interstellar comet observed in our solar system and only the second interstellar visitor observed in our solar system.

KIC 8462852, also known as Boyajian’s Star or Tabby’s Star, is 1,000 light years away from us. It is 50% larger than our sun and 1,000 degrees warmer. And it does not behave like any other star, it darkens and illuminates sporadically. The dust around the star, represented here in an artist’s illustration, may be the most likely cause of his strange behavior.

This is an artist’s impression that the impulse of a massive neutron star is delayed by the passage of a white dwarf star between the neutron star and the Earth. Astronomers have detected the most massive neutron star so far due to this delay.

The VISTA telescope of the Southern European Observatory captured a stunning image of the Great Magellanic cloud, one of our closest galactic neighbors. The telescope’s near-infrared capability showcases millions of individual stars.

Astronomers believe that comet C / 2019 Q4 may be the second interstellar visitor known to our solar system. It was first spotted on August 30 and taken over by the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii on September 10, 2019.

A star known as S0-2, represented as the blue and green object in this artist’s illustration, approached the supermassive black hole to the center of the Milky Way in 2018. This provided a test for Einstein’s theory of general relativity .

This is a radio image of the Milky Way galactic center. The radio bubbles discovered by MeerKAT extend vertically above and below the plane of the galaxy.

A kilanova was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, seen here next to the red arrow. Kilanovaes are huge explosions that create heavy elements like gold and platinum.

This is the artist’s representation of a black hole about to swallow a neutron star. The detectors reported this possible event on August 14th.

This artist’s illustration shows LHS 3844b, a nearby rocky exoplanet. It is 1.3 times the mass of the Earth and orbits a cold M-nana star. The surface of the planet is probably dark and covered with cooled volcanic material and there is no detectable atmosphere.

The concept of an artist of the explosion of a massive star in a dense stellar environment.

Galaxy NGC 5866 is 44 million light years from Earth. It looks flat because we can only see its edge in this image captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a fascinating new portrait of Jupiter, showing its bright colors and swirling clouds in the atmosphere.

This is the impression of an artist of the huge and distant ancient galaxies observed with ALMA.

Clouds of incandescent gas and newborn stars make up the Gull Nebula in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.

An artist’s concept of how the first stars looked immediately after the Big Bang.

The spiral galaxy NGC 2985 is located approximately 70 million light years from our solar system in the constellation Ursa Major.

Early in the history of the universe, the Milky Way galaxy collided with a dwarf galaxy, on the left, which helped form the ring and structure of our galaxy as it is known today.

An artist’s illustration of a thin disk embedded in a supermassive black hole in the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, 130 million light years away.

Hubble captured this vision of a spiral galaxy called NGC 972 that appears to bloom with a new star formation. The orange glow is created when the hydrogen gas reacts to the intense light that flows outward from the newly born stars nearby.

This is the JO201 jellyfish galaxy.

The Eta Carinae star system, located 7,500 light years from Earth, underwent a major explosion in 1838 and the Hubble Space Telescope is still catching the consequences. This new ultraviolet image reveals the hot clouds of incandescent gas reminiscent of fireworks.

‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar visitor observed in our solar system, is shown in an artist’s illustration.

This is an artist rendering of ancient supernovae who bombed Earth with cosmic energy millions of years ago.

The impression of an artist of CSIRO’s Australian radio telescope CSARO Pathfinder finds a fast radio that determines its precise position.

The Whirlpool galaxy has been captured in different wavelengths of light. On the left is an image of visible light. The next image combines visible and infrared light, while the two on the right show different wavelengths of infrared light.

The electrically charged C60 molecules, in which 60 carbon atoms are arranged in a hollow sphere reminiscent of a soccer ball, were found by the Hubble Space Telescope in the interstellar medium between the star systems.

These are enlarged galaxies behind large galaxy clusters. The pink halos reveal the gas that surrounds distant galaxies and its structure. The gravitational lens effect of clusters multiplies the images of galaxies.

The illustration by this artist shows a blue quasar in the center of a galaxy.

The NICER detector on the International Space Station recorded 22 months of night X-ray data to create this map of the whole sky.

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured this mosaic of the star-shaped regions of Cepheus C and Cepheus.

Galaxy NGC 4485 collided with its largest galactic neighbor NGC 4490 million years ago, leading to the creation of new stars seen on the right side of the image.

Astronomers developed a mosaic of the distant universe called Hubble Legacy Field, which documents 16 years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. The image contains 200,000 galaxies dating back 13.3 billion years to just 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The view of a terrestrial telescope on the Great Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy of our Milky Way. The insert was taken from the Hubble Space Telescope and shows one of the galaxy’s star clusters.

One of the brightest planetary nebulae in the sky and first discovered in 1878, the NGC 7027 nebula can be seen towards the Swan constellation.

The asteroid 6478 Gault is seen with NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which shows two thin comet-like debris tails that tell us that the asteroid is slowly undergoing self-destruction. The bright stripes surrounding the asteroid are background stars. The asteroid Gault is located 214 million miles from the Sun, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The ghostly shell in this image is a supernova, and the bright trail it takes away from it is a pulsar.

Hidden in one of the darkest corners of the Orion constellation, this cosmic Bat is spreading its clouded wings through interstellar space two thousand light years away. It is illuminated by the young stars embedded in its core – despite being enveloped by opaque dust clouds, their light rays still illuminate the nebula.

In this illustration, several rings of dust surround the sun. These rings are formed when the gravities of the planets pull the specks of dust into orbit around the sun. Recently, scientists have detected a ring of dust in Mercury’s orbit. Others speculate that the source of the Venus dust ring is a group of co-orbital asteroids that have never been detected before.

This is the impression of an artist of globular star clusters surrounding the Milky Way.

The impression of an artist of life on a planet in orbit around a binary star system, visible as two suns in the sky.

An illustration by the artist of one of the most distant solar system objects observed so far, VG18 of 2018 – also known as “Farout”. The pink hue suggests the presence of ice. We still have no idea what “FarFarOut” is like.

This is the artist’s concept of the tiny moon Hippocamp which was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. Only 20 miles in diameter, it could actually be a fragment broken by a much larger nearby moon, Proteus, seen as a crescent moon in the background.

In this illustration, an asteroid (bottom left) breaks under the powerful gravity of LSPM J0207 + 3331, the oldest and coldest white dwarf known to be surrounded by a ring of dusty debris. Scientists think that the system’s infrared signal is best explained by two distinct rings made up of dust supplied by crumbling asteroids.

The impression of an artist of the deformed and twisted disk of the Milky Way. This occurs when the rotational forces of the massive center of the galaxy pull onto the outer disk.

This 1.3 kilometer (0.8 mile) Kuiper belt object discovered by researchers at the edge of the solar system is believed to be the step between dust and ice spheres and fully formed planets.

A selfie taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover on Vera Rubin Ridge before moving to a new location.

The Hubble Space Telescope has found a dwarf galaxy hidden behind a large star cluster located in our cosmic neighborhood. It is so old and unspoiled that researchers have called it a “living fossil” from the early universe.

How did huge black holes form in the early universe? The rotating gas disk of this halo of dark matter is divided into three groups which collapse under their own gravity to form supermassive stars. Those stars will quickly collapse and form huge black holes.

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured this image of the Great Magellanic cloud, a satellite galaxy for our Milky Way galaxy. Astrophysicists now believe it could collide with our galaxy in two billion years.

A mysterious luminous object in the sky, nicknamed “The Cow”, has been captured in real time by telescopes around the world. Astronomers believe that it could be the birth of a black hole or a neutron star or a new class of objects.

An illustration depicts the detection of a fast repeating radio burst from a mysterious source 3 billion light years from Earth.

Comet 46P / Wirtanen will pass within 7 million miles of Earth on December 16th. The spooky green coma is the size of Jupiter, although the comet itself has a diameter of about three quarters of a mile.

This mosaic image of the asteroid Bennu is made up of 12 PolyCam images collected on December 2 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a distance of 15 miles.

This image of a globular cluster of stars from the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the oldest known collections of stars. The cluster, called NGC 6752, is more than 10 billion years old.

An image of Apep captured with the VISIR video camera on the Very Large Telescope of the Southern European Observatory. This “pinwheel” star system is likely to end with a long-lasting burst of gamma rays.

The impression of an artist from the galaxy Abell 2597, which shows the supermassive black hole that expels the cold molecular gas like the pump of a gigantic intergalactic fountain.

An image of the Wild Duck Cluster, where each star is around 250 million years old.

These images reveal the final stage of a union between pairs of galactic nuclei in the disordered nuclei of colliding galaxies.

A radio image of the hydrogen gas in the small Magellanic cloud. Astronomers believe that the dwarf galaxy is slowly dying and will eventually be consumed by the Milky Way.

Further evidence of a supermassive black hole was found in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This visualization uses data from simulations of orbital movements of gas that swirl around 30% of the speed of light on a circular orbit around the black hole.

Do you look like a bat? This gigantic shadow comes from a bright star that is reflected on the dusty disk that surrounds it.

Hey, Bennu! NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, in the process of meeting the primitive asteroid Bennu, is postponing the images as it approaches its target on December 3rd.

These three panels reveal a supernova before, during and after 920 million light years from Earth (left to right) have occurred. The supernova, nicknamed iPTF14gqr, is unusual because although the star was massive, its explosion was rapid and weak. Researchers believe this is due to a companion star that has stolen its mass.

An illustration by the artist of Planet X, who could model the orbits of objects from the external solar system extremely distant such as the TG387 of 2015.

This is an artist’s concept of how SIMP J01365663 + 0933473 might look. It has 12.7 times the mass of Jupiter but a magnetic field 200 times more powerful than that of Jupiter. This object is 20 light years from Earth. It is on the line between being a planet or being a brown dwarf.

The Andromeda galaxy cannibalized and destroyed the once large M32p galaxy, leaving behind this compact galaxy remnant known as the M32. It is completely unique and contains many young stars.

Twelve new moons have been found around Jupiter. This graph shows various groupings of the moons and their orbits, with the newly discovered ones shown in bold.

Scientists and observers around the world have been able to track down a high-energy neutrino in a galaxy with a fast-rotating supermassive black hole in the center, known as the blazar. The galaxy is located to the left of the Orion’s shoulder in its constellation and is approximately 4 billion light years from Earth.

Planets not only appear out of nowhere, but require gas, dust and other processes not fully understood by astronomers. This is an artist’s impression of how “childish” planets seem to form around a young star.

These negative images of 2015 BZ509, circled in yellow, show the first known interstellar object that became a permanent part of our solar system. The ex-asteroid was probably attracted to our solar system by another stellar system 4.5 billion years ago. He then settled in a retrograde orbit around Jupiter.

A close look at the diamond matrix in a meteorite that landed in Sudan in 2008. This is considered to be the first evidence of a proto-planet that helped form terrestrial planets in our solar system.

2004 EW95 is the first carbon-rich asteroid to be confirmed to exist in the Kuiper belt and a relic of the primordial solar system. This curious object probably formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter before being launched billions of miles from its current location in the Kuiper Belt.

NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 28th anniversary in space with this extraordinary and colorful image of the Lagoon Nebula 4,000 light years from Earth. While the entire nebula is 55 light-years wide, this image only reveals a portion of about four light-years.

This is a more star-filled view of the Lagoon Nebula, using Hubble’s infrared capabilities. The reason you can see more stars is because infrared is capable of cutting dust and gas clouds to reveal the abundance of both young stars within the nebula, as well as the most distant stars in the background.

The Rosette Nebula is located 5,000 light years from Earth. The distinctive nebula, which some claim is more like a skull, has a hole in the middle that creates the illusion of its rose-like shape.

This internal slope of a Martian crater has some of the seasonal dark stripes called “recurrent slope line”, or RSL, which a November 2017 report interprets as granular flows, rather than obscuring due to flowing water. The image comes from the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The impression of this artist shows a supernova explosion, which contains the brightness of 100 million suns. The Supernova iPTF14hls, which has exploded multiple times, may be the most massive and longest lasting ever observed.

This illustration shows the hydrocarbon compounds that divide into carbon and hydrogen within the ice giants, such as Neptune, turning into a “diamond rain (rain)”.

This extraordinary image is the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula, where the stars are born. The red filament is a stretch of ammonia molecules that measure 50 light years. Blue represents the gas of the Orion nebula. This image is an observation composite of the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope and NASA’s wide-field infrared exploration telescope. “We still don’t understand in detail how large clouds of gas in our Galaxy collapse to form new stars,” said Rachel Friesen, one of the principal investigators of the collaboration. “But ammonia is an excellent dense gas tracer that forms stars.”

Here’s what the Earth and its moon looks like from Mars. The image is a composite of the best Earth image and the best lunar image taken on November 20, 2016 by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter’s camera takes images in three wavelength bands: infrared, red and blue-green. Mars was about 127 million miles from Earth when the pictures were taken.

PGC 1000714 was initially thought to be a common elliptical galaxy, but a deeper analysis revealed the incredibly rare discovery of a Hoag-like galaxy. It has a round core surrounded by two detached rings.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured these images of the planet’s mysterious hexagon-shaped jetstream in December 2016. The hex was discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. It is estimated to have a diameter larger than two lands.

A dead star gives off a greenish glow in this image of the Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula, located approximately 6,500 light years from Earth in the constellation of Taurus. NASA released the image for Halloween 2016 and picked up on the theme in its press release. The agency said that “the ghoulish-looking object still has an impulse.” At the center of the Crab Nebula is the flattened core, or “heart” of an exploded star. The heart rotates 30 times per second and produces a magnetic field that generates 1 trillion volts, NASA said.

Peering through the thick clouds of dust from the galactic bulge, an international team of astronomers has revealed the unusual mix of stars in the star cluster known as Terzan 5. The new findings indicate that Terzan 5 is one of the primordial blocks of the bulge, most likely the relic of the very first days of the Milky Way.

The conception of an artist from Planet Nine, which would be the most distant planet within our solar system. Similar cluster orbits of extreme objects at the edges of our solar system suggest that a huge planet is located there.

L’impressione di un artista di come potrebbe apparire un buco nero. In February, researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12 billion times the size of the sun.

Are there are oceans on any of Jupiter’s moons? The Juice probe shown in this artist’s impression aims to find out. Picture courtesy of ESA/AOES

Astronomers have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20 light-years away. This is an artist’s concept of the phenomenon.

Venus, bottom, and Jupiter shine brightly above Matthews, North Carolina, on Monday, June 29. The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has been giving a dazzling display in the summer sky. Although the two planets appear to be close together, in reality they are millions of miles apart.

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life, according to NASA. The moon is about the size of Earth’s moon, and there is evidence it has an ocean beneath its frozen crust that may hold twice as much water as Earth. NASA’s 2016 budget includes a request for $30 million to plan a mission to investigate Europa. The image above was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November 25, 1999. It’s a 12-frame mosaic and is considered the the best image yet of the side of Europa that faces Jupiter.

This nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The brightest areas you can see are where the gas is being heated by young stars. Eventually the gas burst outward like champagne after a bottle is uncorked. Scientists call this champagne flow. This new image of the nebula was captured by the European Space Organization’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. RCW 34 is in the constellation Vela in the southern sky. The name means “sails of a ship” in Latin.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter’s three great moons — Io, Callisto, and Europa — passing by at once.

Using powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b, with rings 200 times the size of Saturn’s. This is an artist’s depiction of the rings of planet J1407b, which are eclipsing a star.

A patch of stars appears to be missing in this image from the La Silla Observatory in Chile. But the stars are actually still there behind a cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about 700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens (The Serpent).

This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled. It’s a portion of the galaxy next door, Andromeda (M31).

NASA has captured a stunning new image of the so-called “Pillars of Creation,” one of the space agency’s most iconic discoveries. The giant columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space pieced together this picture that shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Within this deep-space image are 10,000 galaxies, going back in time as far as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Planetary nebula Abell 33 appears ring-like in this image, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The blue bubble was created when an aging star shed its outer layers and a star in the foreground happened to align with it to create a “diamond engagement ring” effect.

This Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied eye. But it’s actually a nebula with a giant star at its center. Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun, but it’s dying and is destined to go supernova.